Windows Memory, CPU and Hard disk meter?

When your PC does anything it is almost always limited in how fast it goes by either the CPU, the RAM or the HD. Are there any programs out there that are able to measure the usage of these resources in some absolute way?

By absolute, I don't mean for example a relative CPU performance of 0-100%. I mean something like number of calculations per second. RAM and HD might be measured by bytes read and bytes written per second. Are there any tools that anyone knows of that measure these things?

This seems like such an obvious tool that I think a lot of us here would find useful that I'm suprised I haven't thought of it before or found anything that might measure these things. I realise it wouldn't be easy to quantitively measure CPU performance but it got me thinking about how the Task Manager comes up with its percentage range. To get a percentage of anything you have to divide measured performance by known maximum performance. These quantities must be known to either Task Manager or even to just the CPU itself and so must be measurable somehow.

Anyway I think it would be great to be able to see where an intensive program is being bottle necked. When you extract a zip with lots of files is it the HD the RAM or the CPU that limits the speed of the process?

 

For individual processes the task manager does all of that (Processes tab -> View -> select columns).
In XP I don't know of a way to do it for the entire CPU but in Vista you can just use the resource manager.

 

does the performance tool under admin tools show you what you need?

 

Click start->run
type 'perfmon'
press return.
right-click on the graph and select add counters.
add anything you want to know about.
enjoy.